AUSTRALIA
Newcastle Herald
Joanne McCarthy
28 May 2017
ANTHONY Foster was integrity personified.
His death on Saturday, aged 64, after he collapsed on Wednesday, has shattered everyone who knew him.
His death has added to the merciless toll that’s a consequence of the Catholic Church’s history of child sexual abuse.
Anthony and wife Chrissie’s two eldest daughters, Emma and Katie, were sexually assaulted by Catholic priest Kevin O’Donnell when they were barely five and six years old, and O’Donnell was in his 70s. Emma died of a medication overdose in 2007, aged 25. Katie was struck by a car in 1999, aged 16, after periods of binge drinking. She survived, but with profound disabilities.
Since the 1990s Anthony and Chrissie Foster have fought the church on behalf of their daughters, but increasingly on behalf of all survivors.
On my desk I have the book Chrissie wrote in 2010, Hell on the Way to Heaven, about that fight, including their attempt to meet Pope Benedict in Sydney during World Youth Day events in 2008, and the church’s shocking response – that some people were “dwelling crankily on old wounds”.
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